The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  schoolwork-induced sleep deprivation: See, e.g., Anne G. Wheaton, Daniel P. Chapman, and Janet B. Croft, “School Start Times, Sleep, Behavioral, Health, and Academic Outcomes: A Review of the Literature,” Journal of School Health 86, no. 5 (May 2016): 363–81, accessed July 10, 2018, https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/38887/cdc_38887_DS1.pdf. Wheaton et al. name schoolwork as one of a few significant factors in adolescent sleep deprivation, citing Mary A. Carskadon, “Factors Influencing Sleep Patterns of Adolescents,” in Adolescent Sleep Patterns: Biological, Social, and Psychological Influences, ed. M. A. Carskadon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8–9.

  twenty-four hours a day: Anonymous lawyer in conversation with the author. Email record on file with author.

  advance through the hierarchy: Ho, Liquidated, 87.

  “the hardest working”: Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), 56. Hereafter cited as Hochschild, The Time Bind. The executive added, “It’s going to be a long time before somebody becomes the CEO of a company saying, ‘I’m going to be a wonderfully balanced person’—because there are just too many others who aren’t. The environment here is very competitive” (56–57).

  twenty-five fewer weekly hours: Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 65–66. Hereafter cited as Jacobs and Gerson, The Time Divide. Nearly two-thirds of all workers would reduce their workweek by an average of ten hours. Steven Ginsberg, “Raising Corporate Profits by Reaching Out to Families,” Washington Post, April 19, 1998, H7; Sue Shellenbarger, “Study of U.S. Workers Finds Sharp Rise Since 1992 in Desire to Reduce Hours,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 1998, A10. For discussion of the generational shift in priorities within law and accounting firms as young men as well as women express greater desire for time with their families, see Douglas McCracken, “Winning the Talent War for Women: Sometimes It Takes a Revolution,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 2000, 159, 161; Bruce Balestier, “‘Mommy Track’ No Career Derailment,” New York Law Journal, June 9, 2000, 24; Terry Carter, “Your Time or Your Money,” ABA Journal, February 2001, 26. One survey by Harris Interactive and the Radcliffe Public Policy Center found that almost three-quarters of men in their middle thirties, compared to only a quarter of men over sixty-five, would be willing to take lower salaries in exchange for more time available for their family. Kirstin Downey Grimsley, “Family a Priority for Young Workers: Survey Finds Changes in Men’s Thinking,” Washington Post, May 3, 2000, E1. See generally Bruce Tulgan, The Manager’s Pocket Guide to Generation X (Pelham, MA: HRD Press, 1997).

  They say this because: Nearly three-quarters found that work interfered with their capacity to maintain their home, 58 percent experienced work as an obstacle to strong relationships with their children, 46 percent found that work obstructed good relations with their spouses (45 percent reported being too tired, on seeing their spouses at the end of a working day, to say anything to them at all), and 50 percent reported that their jobs made it impossible to have a satisfying sex life. Hewlett and Luce, “Extreme Jobs.”

  “time famine”: American Bar Association, The Report of “At the Breaking Point,” a National Conference on the Emerging Crisis in the Quality of Lawyers’ Health and Lives, Its Impact on Law Firms and Client Services (American Bar Association, 1991), 3.

  one in ten applicants: Preschool admissions consultants, whose hourly fees often climb well into the hundreds, say that some elite Manhattan preschools accept as few as 4 or 5 percent of applicants per year. See Elyse Moody, “Confessions of a Preschool Admissions Coach,” LearnVest, June 18, 2013, accessed July 10, 2018, www.learnvest.com/2013/06/confessions-of-a-preschool-admissions-coach [inactive], and Emily Jane Fox, “How New York’s 1% Get Kids into Preschool,” CNN Money, June 19, 2014, accessed July 10, 2018, http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/10/luxury/preschool-new-york-city/. For comparison, the acceptance rates for the classes of 2021 at Harvard, Yale, and West Point are 5.2, 6.9, and 9.5 percent respectively. See “Admissions Statistics,” Harvard University, accessed July 10, 2018, https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics; “Class of 2021 Is One for the Record Books,” YaleNews, May 16, 2017, accessed July 10, 2018, https://news.yale.edu/2017/05/16/class-2021-one-record-books; and “Class of 2021—By the Numbers,” U.S. Military Academy, accessed July 10, 2018, www.usma.edu/parents/SiteAssets/RDayWelcomeBrief2017.pdf.

  now commonly apply: See “An Hereditary Meritocracy,” The Economist, January 24, 2015, accessed July 10, 2018, www.economist.com/briefing/2015/01/22/an-hereditary-meritocracy, describing the practice of Jennifer Brozost of the Peas educational consultancy. See also David Kirp, The Sandbox Investment:The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), hereafter cited as Kirp, The Sandbox Investment, and Liz Moyer, “The Most Expensive Preschools,” Forbes, September 19, 2007, accessed July 10, 2018, www.forbes.com/2007/09/18/education-preschool-kindergarden-biz-cx_lm_0919preschool.html.

  Nearly thirty thousand students: See Leslie Brody, “Who Got into Stuyvesant and New York’s Other Elite Public High Schools,” Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2018, www.wsj.com/articles/who-got-into-stuyvesant-and-new-yorks-other-elite-public-high-schools-1520465259.

  Elite universities that: For instance, in 1991, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology admitted 32 percent, 31 percent, and 30 percent of applicants respectively; in 2016 they admitted 6 percent, 8 percent, and 8 percent. Among “top ten” universities, the average acceptance rate in 1991 was 27 percent. In 2016 it was 8 percent. The “top ten” universities, for purposes of this claim, are: the California Institute of Technology, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. The construction of the list is obviously imprecise, but these eleven universities commonly appear (with strikingly little fluctuation) among the top ten universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. For 1991 acceptance rates, see Peterson’s Guide to Four-Year Colleges, 13th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Peterson’s Guides, 1993). For 1995 acceptance rates, see America’s Best Colleges 1997 (Washington, DC: U.S. News & World Report, 1996–97). For 2016 acceptance rates, see “National University Rankings,” U.S. News & World Report, accessed July 26, 2018, www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities?_sort=acceptance-rate&_sort-direction=asc.

  can reach twenty to one: See Debra Cassens Weiss, “These BigLaw Firms Had the Highest Spreads in Partner Compensation,” ABA Journal Daily News, June 19, 2013, accessed July 13, 2018, www.abajournal.com/news/article/these_biglaw_firms_had_the_highest_spreads_in_partner_compensation/, and Aric Press, “Revealed: Compensation Spreads of the American Law 200,” American Lawyer, June 17, 2013, accessed July 13, 2018, www.law.com/americanlawyer/almID/1202600641230/.

  and the firms expel: See Joe Patrice, “Biglaw Partners on the Hot Seat: Firms Are Demoting Partners Hand over Fist,” Above the Law, October 11, 2016, accessed July 13, 2018, https://abovethelaw.com/2016/10/biglaw-partners-on-the-hot-seat-firms-are-demoting-partners-hand-over-fist/, and Sara Randazzo, “Law Firms Demote Partners as Pressure Mounts over Profits,” Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2016, accessed July 13, 2013, www.wsj.com/articles/law-firms-demote-partners-as-pressure-mounts-over-profits-1476137818/.

  an annual “bonus day”: See Kevin Roose and Susanne Craig, “It’s Goldman Bonus Day,” New York Times, January 19, 2012, accessed July 16, 2018, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/its-goldman-sachs-bonus-day/, and Susanne Craig, “It’s Bonus Week on Wall Street,” New York Times, January 15, 2013, accessed July 16, 2018, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/its-bonus-week-on-wall-street/.

  Large corporations distinguish: See, e.g., “Ascending to the C-Suite,” McKinsey & Company, April 2015, accessed July 16, 2018, www.mck
insey.com/featured-insights/leadership/ascending-to-the-c-suite.

  even CEOs get their compensation: See Chapter 4.

  the battle to win intensifies: See Robert Frank and Philip Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us (New York: Penguin, 1995). Hereafter cited as Frank and Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society.

  the alternative to victory is elimination: See, e.g., Marc Galanter and Thomas Palay, Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  liberates its owners: This liberating power of conventional wealth has in fact grown over time, as the social and economic structures within which physical and financial capital is owned increasingly separate ownership from control over the capital. An aristocratic landowner, in the ancien régime, may have been bound by a combination of legal and social institutions actively to administer his lands in a particular way, with designated tenant farmers selling to designated markets. The rise of a commercial economy effectively commodified physical capital—most notably land, but also the tools and materials deployed in traditional, guild-based trades. In this way, the commercial economy pulled wealth out of its fixed social context and freed owners of physical or financial capital from the constraints that had bound aristocrats and artisans.

  The midcentury American joint stock corporation, owned by dispersed shareholders and professionally run by (modestly) salaried managers, whose incomes were independent of profits, represented the high point of this separation. See generally Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), and Walther Rathenau, In Days to Come, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1921). Wealth constituted in this fashion frees its owner from every thick, personal connection to her assets and from every call that these assets might previously have asserted on her time and attention. The only rational—indeed, the only possible—course of conduct for an owner of such wealth is passively to let rents come to him as income, and then to devote his active energies to whatever projects or passions incite his authentic ambition. Commodified physical and financial wealth emancipates the rich.

  human capital: The term human capital is itself deeply embedded in meritocracy’s career. Long disfavored as crass, it rose to prominence in the 1960s, just as the meritocracy that is now fully leaved was first conceived, at least as a serious enterprise. Indeed, the term entered mainstream thought through the economist Gary Becker—meritocracy’s most formidable ideologue, both for better and for worse—who used it as the title of a book published in 1964. See Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). The use of “leaved” and “conceived” borrows from Philip Larkin, “Long Lion Days,” in Larkin, The Complete Poems, 323.

  “devours everything in its path”: See Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, in Anton Chekhov, Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen (New York: Viking Penguin, 1959), 363.

  “Human Capital Management”: Kevin Roose, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014), 35, and “Human Capital Management,” Goldman Sachs, accessed July 16, 2018, www.goldmansachs.com/careers/divisions/human-capital-management/.

  Fewer than one in one hundred jobs: Here see the calculations reported in Daniel Markovits, “How Much Redistribution Should There Be?,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003): 2311–13.

  enslaves them in production: This metaphor runs surprisingly deep. It has been observed that one of the deepest pathologies of slavery was to make every human excellence—intelligence, strength, or beauty—an additional source of vulnerability for the slave, a new invitation and avenue for ruthless exploitation by a slaveowner. Meritocratic inequality based on superordinate labor adds self-ownership to this regime, which makes a massive moral difference: it enables the superordinate worker to capture the benefits that come from her own exploitation. But capturing the benefits does not erase the burdens, and self-ownership inserts exploitation inside the elite’s own lives. Self-ownership is no mere metaphor but rather a literal social and economic fact, with immediate and concrete consequences. An owner of human capital is not just the person who owns but also the person who is owned.

  useful without fuss: This formulation borrows from Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 174. Hardy’s translation reads, “Honour is to be useful without vanity.” George Orwell’s essays on Koestler use the word “fuss.”

  “gold stars” and “shiny things”: See Sturm and Makovi, “Full Participation,” 37.

  the right food: See John Updike, Rabbit, Run (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 48. “Oh Harry,” the protagonist’s old basketball coach complains, “you can’t understand an old man’s hunger, you eat and eat and it’s never the right food. You can’t understand that.”

  up the class structure: These formulations benefited from a discussion with Julieta Lemaitre.

  bright, unreal path: The phrase borrows from Philip Larkin, “Nothing Significant Was Really Said,” in Larkin, The Complete Poems, 178.

  No quantity of income: An astute and timely reflection on why this is so appears in Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life (New York: Other Press, 2013). Hereafter cited as Skidelsky and Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough?

  White-Collar Salt Mines: This phrase follows Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath, “Why You Hate Work,” New York Times, May 30, 2014, accessed July 17, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hate-work.html.

  she urinated on herself: See Frank Bruni, “Naked Confessions of the College-Bound,” New York Times, June 14, 2014, accessed July 17, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-oversharing-in-admissions-essays.html.

  “Duck Syndrome”: See Julie Scelfo, “Suicide on Campus and the Pressure of Perfection,” New York Times, July 27, 2015, accessed July 17, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/stress-social-media-and-suicide-on-campus.html?mcubz=0.

  “The 10 minutes that I give”: See Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams, “Manage Your Work, Manage Your Life,” Harvard Business Review, March 2014, accessed July 17, 2018, https://hbr.org/2014/03/manage-your-work-manage-your-life. See also Anne Weisberg, “The Workplace Culture That Flying Nannies Won’t Fix,” New York Times, August 24, 2015, accessed July 17, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/opinion/the-workplace-culture-that-flying-nannies-wont-fix.html?mcubz=0.

  where four-fifths of adults: See U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates 2012–2016, Educational Attainment, Palo Alto city, California, accessed July 17, 2018, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF. According to these estimates, 80.0 percent of Palo Alto’s adult population hold BAs and 51.5 percent hold graduate or professional degrees.

  triples the national median: Median family income in Palo Alto nearly triples the national median, and median home values are about ten times the national median.

  Median family income in Palo Alto is about $176,000. See U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates 2012–2016, Selected Economic Characteristics, Palo Alto city, California, accessed July 17, 2018, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF. The national median is about $68,000. See U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates 2012–2016, Selected Economic Characteristics, United States, accessed July 17, 2018, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF.

  According to the Census Bureau, median house prices in Palo Alto and St. Clair Shores, for the period between 2012 and 2016, were $1,702,100 and $102,400 respectively. See U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates 2012–2016, Selected Housing Characteristics, Palo Alto
city, California, and St. Clair Shores city, Michigan, accessed July 17, 2018, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml. According to Zillow, average home values in Palo Alto in July 2018 were $2,572,300. See “Palo Alto CA Real Estate,” Zillow, accessed July 18, 2018, www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Palo-Alto-CA/26374_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/71.483085,-113.07129,24.407137,-173.188477_rect/3_zm/. And according to Realtor, the median prices of homes for sale in Palo Alto on July 18, 2018, was $2,390,000—between seven and ten times the national median. See “Palo Alto, CA Real Estate & Homes for Sale,” Realtor.com, accessed July 18, 2018, www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Palo-Alto_CA; “United States Home Prices & Values,” Zillow, accessed July 18, 2018, www.zillow.com/home-values/; and U.S. Census Bureau, “Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, updated April 24, 2018, accessed July 18, 2018, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS.

  Silicon Valley, moreover, enfolds Palo Alto in a mantle of wealth and education, stretching from San Francisco to San Jose. The technology and venture capital firms that dominate the local economy—companies like Apple and Google, and New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital—pay immense wages to one of the best-educated and most elite workforces ever assembled, anywhere.

  St. Clair Shores: According to estimates based on data from the 2013–14 school year, St Clair Shores’ Lakeview Public Schools spend $10,309 per student per year. Palo Alto Unified school district spends $18,795 per student per year. See National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), distributed by the Institute of Educational Sciences, accessed June 30, 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/index.asp.

  nationwide on the SAT: In 2017, the average student at Henry M. Gunn High School scored 663 (about the 90th percentile score nationally) on the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section of the new SAT and 706 (about the 95th-percentile score nationally) on the Math section. The average student at Palo Alto High scored 664 in Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and 680 in Math (both about 90th-percentile scores according to national rubrics). See Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto High School 2017–2018 School Profile, accessed July 18, 2018, https://paly.net/sites/default/files/Paly1718_profile_and_grading_key.pdf [inactive]; Henry M. Gunn High School, Henry M. Gunn High School 2017–18 School Profile, accessed July 18, 2018, https://gunn.pausd.org/sites/default/files/2017-2018%20Gunn%20School%20Profile.pdf [inactive]; and College Board, SAT: Understanding Scores 2017, accessed July 18, 2018, https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf.